by Bryan Camp
Renai was moving before she thought about it, dropping to her knees and cradling Sal’s head in her arms, his tongue lolling out. Tears swirled in her eyes, fear and anger and confusion welling up and spilling out. She reached for the storm but couldn’t grasp it, felt it whirling within her but just out of reach.
The ghost word, she thought, and my wings, and thinking two different things at the same time made a tearing sensation rip through her head, a pain so sharp that flecks of light danced in her vision.
Cordelia laughed, a musical, beautiful, cruel sound. “What am I to do with you, little psychopomp?” she said, more to herself than to Renai. “Like you, I’m of two minds.” She smirked behind a hand daintily pressed to her mouth, a gesture that was condescendingly forced, a cat toying with her food. “Forgive my little aside, I simply couldn’t resist. And yet, the question remains. What is to be done?” She came closer, a graceful sweep that was more glide than walk. She crouched down, wrinkling her perfect nose at Salvatore. “I hadn’t counted on this tiresome stray spoiling my surprise quite so soon. I’d hoped you’d find the boy for me before I had to reveal myself.” Sal struggled in Renai’s arms, his claws scratching at the concrete, a growl in his throat. Renai didn’t know if he was trying to flee or bite, but she could tell he didn’t have the strength for either.
The goddess—she was certainly no mere psychopomp—looked up at Renai, and their eyes met. Cordelia’s were deep pools of night: vast and dark and terrible. But not as terrible as her smile. “I could simply destroy you now, of course. Spare you the conflict that’s already tearing you apart.” She tilted her head back and forth, as though she were considering her options, a scale tipping one way and the other. “But then, I’d have to find that troublesome child on my own. Do I have time for that? No, I do not. I barely have the patience for this conversation.”
Sal made a coughing, gasping noise that Renai—even with the pain lancing through her skull and the fear pounding through her veins—recognized as laughter. “Me. Fucking. Either,” he said, each word a wheeze. He’d definitely have to change skins after this. Cordelia had beaten the hell out of him.
Cordelia flicked her eyes in Sal’s direction, literally looking down her nose at him, an expression Renai had never understood until this moment. When the goddess turned her attention back to Renai, her whole face was lit with brutal glee. “I do so love it when a solution to a problem presents itself so neatly, don’t you?” When Renai opened her mouth to answer, Cordelia shushed her with a finger held to her own lips. “I don’t actually care what you have to say. I just want you to watch and remember.”
With that same finger, Cordelia reached down and touched Salvatore between his eyes. The psychopomp stiffened, whether from pain or in anticipation of it, Renai couldn’t tell. “Like you,” Cordelia said, “I am a being of dissolution. Of endings. Of destruction.” She squinted at something only she could see, her eyes roving around, seeking. “Ah, here we are,” she said, her pretty mouth twisting into a sneer. “A perfect ending for a disgusting mongrel like you.”
“No,” Renai whispered, as if, somehow, she knew what was coming. From far away, almost as if she were imagining it, she heard screeching tires, saw a blur of motion in her peripheral vision, and then heard a thud and a truncated yelp of animal pain, sickening and final. A death snatched from the nowhere of possibility and forced into the here and now. In her arms, Sal collapsed in on himself, bones crunching and organs squelching and his face broken. She watched the light go out of his eyes.
“No,” she whispered again.
Cordelia bounced to her feet, buoyant and satisfied, swiping her hands against each other in a pantomime of a job well done. “That’s settled,” she said. “Now you’ve the proper motivation—”
Renai didn’t know what the goddess intended to say next, because her vision went white and a profound silence filled her ears. Even though she couldn’t hear herself, she knew she was screaming, in rage, in pain, in grief. The two halves of her each tried to act, each straining for the storm inside, for the destructive magic that lived in one’s capacity for hate and the other’s for empathy. The power that exploded from one version of herself when faced with injustice, that spilled from the other to break the bonds between the dead and their Shadows. Because she felt both hate for Cordelia and empathy for Salvatore, both sides of her reached for the same power, and she fought herself, wrestling for control of mind and body and magic, hammering at the crack in the foundation of her being.
As the sweet release of darkness rose up to claim her, Renai’s final thought was to wonder who would guide her through the Gates, now that Sal was gone.
Part Three
the far lands
Chapter Twenty-four
Sometimes the two are opposites, one good and bright, the other dark and malevolent. Ahriman and Ahura Mazda, locked in eternal combat. The twins Chernobog and Belobog, one with hair like pitch, his brother with eyes like the noonday sun. Glooscap and Malsumis, formed from the dust left over after the creation of man, one tasked with creating a perfect world, the other bent on building a land of misery. Avuncular St. Nicholas, who brings good children gifts and delight; demonic Krampus, who steals bad children away to be tormented. Sometimes one is found on the other side of the coin, not in opposition but in balance. The savage Enkidu comes from the wilderness to humble and tame the urbane, city-building Gilgamesh. The fierce Erzulie Dantor protects the children borne by her other aspect, the seductive Erzulie Freda. The self-centered Mait’ Carrefour, who closes the ways that the benevolent Papa Legba opens for us all. Sometimes the one is a part of the whole that has slipped away: the Norse fylgja, the Egyptian Ka, the psyche’s id.
Nothing is ever only itself. Everything is a part of something greater. Every light casts a shadow.
Renai woke up, relieved to find that it had all been just a terrible dream. Morning sunlight filtered in through a nearby window, and she let herself sink back beneath the covers, trying to remember what day it was. The bustle of her family moving about the house as everyone started their day—murmured conversations and a shower running and something sizzling in a pan and the scent of coffee—were as warm and comforting as the blanket she curled beneath.
And then a pan slammed against the stove and Regal Constant yelled something that sounded like “cock-nosed fuck-weasel,” and Renai came all the way awake to the missing-the-last-stair realization that it was all real, every horrible second of it.
She closed her eyes and willed herself to fall back asleep, but gave it up after only a few heartbeats. She rolled over onto her back, pinning one of her wings uncomfortably beneath her. Groaning in frustration, she sat up, to find that someone had undressed her before putting her to bed. Her cheeks flushed.
That’s when she noticed the scars.
Renai yanked the covers back and hopped out of the bed—a wide four-poster affair that had the baby-powder-and-peppermint-muscle-cream scent of an old lady’s sheets—to get a better look at herself. Thankfully, whoever had put her to bed had left her panties on, so at least all her business hadn’t been put out into the street. But they’d taken other liberties. Thick, livid red lines stretched down the center of each leg, crisscrossed over her belly, looped and swirled across her chest and around her shoulders, and then ran down her arms to her wrists. Each wrist had been circled multiple times, ending in what looked like an elaborate knot.
Tentatively, she ran a fingertip along one of the lines on her stomach and found that it didn’t hurt. Nor was it exactly a scar. Instead of rigid flesh darker than the rest of her skin, the raised line on her belly was scarlet red and was rough and pliant to her touch. It felt, impossibly, like spun cloth that had adhered to her skin. It was as bright as the ink of a fresh tattoo and itched like one, too.
Same color as the stains on Seth’s hands, she thought. It was a single person’s thought, without conflict or confusion—a person who had met both Seth in a bar in the world of the living and Mason in a co
ffee shop in the world of the dead, who had collected Miguel Flores’s soul in Orleans Parish Prison and then guided him through the Gates to Barren’s streetcar. Renai remembered it all and more, things neither self had been able to recall: her time with Jude and her resurrection and those missing days during the Hallows. For a moment the room spun, and Renai had to hold on to one of the posts to stay upright.
Then she pushed it all down and focused on what was in front of her.
The Hallows had started, so both spirits and ghouls were running the streets. Seth and Cross and Mason and Cordelia all had some kind of scheme going—either working together or against each other—to turn the confusion to their advantage, and the Thrones didn’t seem to give even half a fuck. And at the center of it all: the absent, elusive, infuriating Ramses St. Cyr. Her own shit would have to wait.
But first, she needed to find her damn clothes.
She was in a small bedroom with hardwood floors that creaked whenever she moved, with walls empty of pictures—likely all lost during the storm—and covered in peach paint; a queen-sized bed ate up most of the floor space. An alarm clock on a nightstand told her that it was late in the morning, closer to noon than dawn. A vanity hutch stood against the wall directly opposite the closed door, its mirror covered with a dusty black sheet. On the table beneath the mirror, neatly folded, she saw an assortment of the clothes she’d been wearing the night before.
She saw the boots first, remembered both wearing them and coveting them, and her vision swam for a second. Don’t wallow in it, she thought, just move. So she shimmied into the frilly white dress—a maneuver complicated by the cumbersome butterfly wings growing out of her back—and stuffed her feet into the combat boots, glad that whatever power had decided on her wardrobe had given her something to cover her boobs, at least, but pissed that they hadn’t left her any socks.
“Beggars and choosers, Renaissance,” she muttered to herself as she yanked her laces tight, “beggars and choosers.”
She scooped up the jacket, knowing that there was no way she’d be able to endure its sturdy weight crushing her wings against her back, and checked the pockets. Empty. Of course. The messenger bag holding her tablet, her jeans and her phone, the coin of Fortune and the black glass knife and the deck of Shadow cards and the seeing stone and the cigarette holding the sliver of death, all gone.
She reached into the nowhere place where she kept her mirror, and, after a moment of waving her arm around in awkward jerks, like a white person shaking a handkerchief at their first second line, she managed to get a hand on it and drag it into reality. Least I still have this, she thought, patting the mirror’s surface.
Her moment of triumph was short-lived, however, when she thought of all she’d lost to get here, wherever here was. What was the damn point of any of this? She clenched her teeth and fought down a scream. All that time and effort, and all she had to show for it was a cheap watch, a pair of wings too small and weak to carry her, a broken mirror, and a jacket whose magic she couldn’t use, since she couldn’t even wear it.
She ran a finger along the line of red that ran across her shoulder, and a terrible possibility occurred to her. She didn’t consider herself a vain person, but the thought that these marks might also crisscross her face made her shudder. She looked into her broken mirror and found, to her relief, that her face remained as she remembered it. Her hair, though, had changed, her dreads still as long and tightly twisted as they’d been in the Underworld, but now they shimmered when she moved, iridescent as a raven’s wing. She grinned, imagining what Sal would say when he saw it, and then she remembered, and grief took the wind out of her like a fist to the gut. She sank back down onto the bed, and let it loose, tears streaming and sobs racking her body, no amount of willpower able to force away the memory of holding him when he died.
Renai had known loss before—a grandmother to age, an uncle to a heart attack, a classmate to drunk driving—but this hurt worse, because she knew for a fact that Sal was just gone. No afterlife, no journey through the Gates, no chance at the Far Lands. Just a spirit. Just a part of the machine.
Expendable.
After a while, she managed to draw in a shaky breath and hold it, to sit up and wipe the tears from her puffy eyes and send the mirror back to the nowhere place where she’d found it. It felt like she’d been weeping for a long time, but when she checked the clock, only a few minutes had passed. Time flies when you’re havin’ fun, she heard in Salvatore’s voice, and a gasp of a laugh burst out of her, a sigh that she sucked back in so that it didn’t become more crying. Okay, Sal, she thought, let’s do this.
The door opened onto a dining room, a table just big enough for four, an ugly rug on the floor, a half-wall that formed a bar looking into the kitchen the next room over. Regal and Leon sat across from each other, plates of food in front of them, both silent and now looking at her.
“Morning,” Leon said, at the same time that Regal said, “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.” Leon swiveled around in his chair and, though his back was to Renai, she knew he was giving Regal some serious stank-eye. Before Renai could say anything herself, though, she smelled eggs and coffee and biscuits, and her stomach yowled like an angry cat, and then everyone was laughing and whatever tension had filled the room slipped away.
Renai was filled, suddenly, with a sensation she couldn’t explain; she just knew that it felt deeply and profoundly good to be around people again. People who saw her for more than an instant, people who were alive with more than a shade’s lurking, silent presence.
She moved toward the kitchen, but Leon motioned her to sit at the table and went into the kitchen himself. The next few moments were filled with a kind of blissful domesticity, Leon asking what she wanted to eat, Regal telling her her hair was “seriously badass,” and Renai just soaking it all in, knowing it wouldn’t last.
And then the food was in front of her—scrambled eggs and biscuits made from scratch and grits so full of cheese that they were orange—and she was shoveling it away, barely pausing to breathe, much less hold a conversation. When she’d just about cleaned her plate, a third voice spoke from the far side of the room, one that Renai recognized right away.
“If I had any suspicions about who you is, the way you eat like my good-for-nothin’ sister surely done eased my mind.” Renai spun around, and looked into the smiling, tear-streaked face of Celeste Dorcet: the voodoo priestess who had taught her everything she knew about the loa—her mother’s sister, and the last human being who had seen Renai before she was murdered.
They were hugging before Renai realized either of them had moved.
Celeste had aged since the last time Renai had seen her, round cheeks eroded to an ascetic hollowness, gray hairs peeking out from beneath the headscarf wound around her head. More than the five years that had passed weighed on the woman. She stood in the kitchen doorway, a cup of coffee in her unadorned, nail-bitten hands.
The Celeste that Renai had known had gone to the same nail salon every Thursday, had covered her fingers and wrists with rings and bracelets. She’d always said that a mamba’s hands were her ambassadors to the world. Well, to be completely accurate what she’d said was Don’t nobody want healing from a pair of busted-up paws look like they too poor to take care of they ownself, but it was practically the same thing. Renai knew from one glance at Celeste’s hands just how much had changed.
Celeste Dorcet, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, a mamba who could trace her lineage in both teaching and blood to Marie Laveau, had turned her back on her faith.
That hadn’t made her any less sharp, though. “I see you throwin’ them eyes my way, so you might as well ask,” Celeste said.
Renai couldn’t think of a polite way to word it, so she just said it. “What happened to you?”
Celeste’s lips tightened to a thin line. “What you think happened? You died, child.”
The memory swept through Renai unbidden. That night in the voodoo shop in the Quarter, the sam
e day that she’d met Jude Dubuisson for the first time. The scent of cinnamon, a movement at the corner of her vision, and then—
Renai put her hands underneath the table, so no one would see them shaking.
Next thing she knew, she was being led through the Underworld. Not by Salvatore, but by one of the psychopomps who were little better than shades themselves, an unspeaking, unsmiling woman in robes made of light. Renai knew more, knew she’d gotten caught up Jude’s wake in the Underworld, that she’d stood before the Thrones and earned her passage to the Far Lands, that she’d traded it away to give Jude a second chance, a resurrection that had saved the city’s soul and cost her greatly.
Now that she could remember all of it, she had conflicting feelings about the Trickster who had turned her life upside down. On the one hand, she’d made her own choices. He hadn’t tricked her, like the part of her that had lived in the Underworld believed. On the other, if he hadn’t come into Celeste’s shop, she’d have lived the life she was meant to have, which took away some of the shine the part of her that had lived in this world had seen in him.
“I thought I was strong,” Celeste said, shaking Renai out of her thoughts. “I thought after the loa took my husband so young, that I could bow my head to their wisdom, no matter what load they put on my back.” Her jaw trembled, and she tilted her head back, narrowing her eyes like someone fighting back tears. “But when I had to scrub your blood from off my floor, I cursed them with every breath. From the littlest loa ain’t even got a name to the Great Bondye himself, I cursed them all. That’s what happened to me.”
“Jesus,” Leon muttered.
Celeste let a half smile slip past her guard. “Cursed him once or twice, too,” she said.
